Alvin Rabushka. Taxation in Colonial America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xx, 946. $60.00.

At $60.00, this nearly one-thousand-page book packed full of data, with a dozen figures and over a hundred tables, is a bargain. For a half century after the emergence of professional history in the United States in the 1880s, patterns of taxation and finance in the thirteen British colonies that revolted in 1776 were popular subjects for doctoral dissertations, and by 1950, virtually every colony had one or more monographs devoted to its financial system. For the past sixty years, however, colonial historians, even while turning out many sophisticated studies of overseas trade, the money supply, commodity production, labor systems, land distribution, and economic development, have largely ignored this important subject. Alvin Rabushka has set for himself the formidable tasks of pulling together the information in all these older studies, of mastering much of the more recent literature on...